Thinking about peace: a review of five books

I have been (happily) forced into thinking about peace over the last while through a number of serendipitous assignments – teaching a course at Canadian Mennonite University, being involved in a Conscientious Objector conference, and making my way through a number of books for this article.

These are interesting times to belong to one of the historic peace churches, as Mennonite Brethren, and I believe it’s important that we continue to think carefully about the shape of our shared understanding of peace. Indeed, we probably need to consider the strength of our commitment to this dimension of the faith we confess; to ask if our church is a “culture of peace.” This is a question I intend to address in this review of five recently published books on peace.

Chris Marshall’s book, The Little Book of Biblical Justice (Good Books), part of a series entitled The Little Books of Justice and Peacebuilding, is designed to be an accessible, fresh approach to the Bible’s teachings on justice. While short (74 pages), this book is not simplistic and would serve very nicely as an inexpensive guide for study groups or Sunday School classes.

Each year, the Mennonite World Conference chooses one book to add to the Global Anabaptist–Mennonite Shelf of Literature. The 2005 choice was A Culture of Peace: God’s Vision for the Church, co-authored by Alan Kreider, Eleanor Kreider, and Paulus Widjaja (Good Books). The authors argue strongly that peace is central to biblical faith, and in addition, show that the church itself exists as a result of God’s peacemaking activity. Thus, the church becomes crucial to the life of peace. There, we learn peacemaking reflexes (a lovely concept, I think), attitudes of vulnerability and humility, and all of this connected to Christian activity such as worship and evangelism.

The third book under consideration, Transforming the Powers: Peace, Justice and the Domination System (Ray Gingerich and Ted Grimsrud, eds., Fortress Press) comes out of a 2001 conference, at Eastern Mennonite University, devoted to Walter Wink’s thought. Wink is well-known for his work on “the Powers,” work he sums up in three statements: the Powers are good, the Powers are fallen, the Powers must be redeemed. Various essays, mostly by Mennonite scholars, attempt to engage and extend Wink’s thought, which insists that social systems cannot be reformed without addressing both spirituality and outer forms of those systems.

Willard Swartley’s book, Covenant of Peace: The Missing Peace in New Testament Theology and Ethics (Eerdmans), is his magnum opus. This book is written purposefully at a scholarly level, and therefore is full of scholarly apparatus – footnotes, appendices, a massive bibliography, Scripture index, and so on. Swartley is keen to fill a lacuna in New Testament theology and ethics, namely, the study of peace. While Swartley documents the deficiency that concerns him, the burden of the book is a positive one – to show that the entire Bible, but especially the New Testament, is a book of peace.

What follows is a lengthy, detailed study of New Testament texts, with a view to “exposit the contribution that the various NT books and/or authors make to an understanding of peace, while noting on the one side the theological and christological matrix of this thought and, on the other side, observing elements of conflict, combat, and violence within the narratives as well.” Along the way, Swartley engages in constant conversation with a plethora of secondary sources (sometimes almost to the point of distraction), so that part of the book’s value is as a guide to various discussions within the world of NT scholarship. Swartley also includes a helpful chapter engaging Rene Girard’s influential theory of mimetic desire and violence, but from a biblical studies point of view. This is a fine study by a first-rate Mennonite biblical scholar.

The subtitle of the final book in my assigned stack, At Peace and Unafraid: Public Order, Security, and the Wisdom of the Cross (Duane K. Friesen and Gerald W. Schlabach, eds., Herald Press), announces that Mennonite discussions of peace are being taken into new territory in the 21st century. This collection of essays, fruit of the work of the MCC Peace Theology Project, takes a self-consciously “believers church” approach to the implications of peace theology. In the project overview, Gerald Schlabach (who recently converted from Anabaptism to Catholicism) provocatively claims that if Mennonites as peacemakers are committed to the way of Jesus Christ, we “should be prepared to take up problems of security and participate in wider ecumenical, national, and international conversations about them.”

The essays do indeed take up these issues, and many would say it’s about time. I have often heard complaints that pacifists are all too happy to call the police or other institutions to use violence on their behalf. Some Mennonite voices also clamoured for use of violent measures in the wake of 9/11. The book addresses national security, not only in North America but also in Colombia, Indonesia, and Paraguay, as well as the possibilities of “just policing.” The reader is faced with important questions. Will a war on terrorism actually make us secure? Should we embrace positions of conventional political power as part of our peace witness?

While I applaud the direction of these discussions, I admit to a fundamental ambivalence about some of these matters. It’s encouraging to see new territories into which the gospel’s witness to peace reaches. Alfred Neufeld, for example, shows how the 2003 presidential candidate in Paraguay, married to a Mennonite woman, asked a number of Mennonites to serve in government and cabinet in areas of economics, industry, health, education, and state finances. Before accepting, these Christians went through an intense discernment process with a pastoral team.

This seems to indicate that it was not seen as a given that such positions were appropriate for Christians. It is a matter of intense temptation, I believe, to assume that the more Christians find themselves in positions of conventional power, the more opportunity we have to witness to the gospel. Such opportunities may just as well be distractions from a life of discipleship. Sometimes working for the “common good” of a nation isn’t very far from unfaithful nationalism, which quickly makes the justification of violence seem reasonable.

I find John Rempel’s essay, therefore, a very important part of this collection. Rempel shows that earlier generations of Mennonites quickly dropped a distinctively nonviolent identity “once they abandoned a sectarian posture in the name of contributing to the well-being of society.” My concern for us is similar (though I don’t wish it to be mistaken as a call for sectarianism). We seem to be ready to, if not entirely abandon pacifism, at least negotiate it.

I cannot forget the recent visit of a Mennonite Brethren pastor from Colombia. He observed that just as the Colombian church sought to embrace the rich peace heritage of Anabaptism, we in North America seemingly could not rid ourselves of it quickly enough. My hope is that the explorations of these books will lead us more deeply into an understanding of the gospel of peace, rather than peace with compromise.

Paul Doerksen teaches at Canadian Mennonite University and Mennonite Brethren Collegiate Institute, Winnipeg, and is a member of the Board of Faith and Life.